Written by Jo Nesbø

Number 4 in Harry Hole

Publisher: Aschehoug
Pages: 378
Genre: Crime, Thriller, Norwegian
Published: 2002-01-01
Original Language: Norwegian

Høsten har begynt. I et banklokale i Oslo sentrum har filialsjefen fått tjuefem sekunder på å tømme minibanken. Han bruker trettien. Raneren viser seks fingre i overvåkningskameraet og skyter en kvinnelig ansatt. Førstebetjent Harry Hole våkner i leiligheten sin med en tolv timers black-out etter en middag hos Anna, en gammel flamme. Han settes på ranssaken sammen med den nyutdannete Beate Lønn, og da en ny bank blir ranet, søker de hjelp hos den myteomspunne bankraneren Raskol. Anna er forsvunnet. Og høsten har bare akkurat begynt.

Read from 2019-06-19 to 2019-07-01
Read in Norwegian
Rating: 5/5
Review: I really want to say “I will make no excuses for loving this book”, but I did love this book, and, for some reason, as this is a bit of a popcorny crime-story, I feel like I need to make excuses for that. So I hereby apologize for feeling the need to excuse the fact that I loved this book - which I did.

Sure, Sorgenfri (translated to “Nemesis”) is no great work of literature, and, in fact, during this book I had the realisation of why these books translate very well: it’s so much about the story rather than the language, that I can see the story working almost regardless of how it is conveyed. And that’s not to say the language is bad, the story is just really good.

In a way that fascinates me the story in the book reads like a pretty average crime-novel, but once I stopped to think about it (which, to the credit of the book, I only really did when I was “forced” to speak to people about it, and explain what was happening) what it’s actually doing is making a pretty extraordinary story seem ordinary. This story ends up having quite a lot of layers, and being quite complex, but amazingly it never got confusing at all. Reading the book never felt like work, it was a page-turner throughout, and even though the twists weren’t completely unpredictable, that’s only because there was a sensible amount of potential clues and foreshadowing planted in the satisfying way where the twists were things I had thought might happen, but where the way in which they did happen still led to some surprising twists within the twists.

This is a great little book, and if the Harry Hole books continue being anything as good as this, that Nesbø guy deserves all the praise that is being directed toward him.